Lynn Whitfield doesn’t do broke
TheGrio...
Ahead of the release of “Strung,” the actress says audiences have come to expect glamour, power and a little intimidation whenever she shows up on screen.
If you’ve ever noticed that Lynn Whitfield rarely plays a woman worried about making rent, you’re not alone.
During a panel for Peacock’s upcoming thriller “Strung” at the American Black Film Festival, the Emmy-winning actress joked that audiences simply don’t want to see her play broke.
Whitfield has been on the scene for nearly five decades, and in that time, she has brought to life some of Black culture’s most regal and intense women. Through one prestigious television drama after another, she’s built a reputation as the intimidating, powerful woman at the center of the plot. She’s been Josephine Baker, the femme fatale Brandi Web in “A Thin Line Between Love and Hate,” Galleria Garibaldi’s mother, Dorthea in “The Cheetah Girls,” and, of course, the fearsome matriarch Lady Mae Greenleaf in “Greenleaf.”
But she hasn’t been broke. Or at least very rarely. So much so that it’s what fans have come to expect whenever her name is attached to a project.
When the trailer for her upcoming Peacock film, Malcolm D. Lee’s “Strung,” dropped, seeing her command the screen as a fierce, wealthy matriarch in a single frame was enough for many viewers to sign on for its release.
This penchant for playing wealthy powerhouses is also something she’s fully embraced in her career.
During the panel “Peacock’s ‘Strung’ from Script to Screen” at the 30th annual American Black Film Festival last week—where the film also made its debut—the 73-year-old actress admitted she’s well aware of the reputation.
After moderator Alexis Frazier of WPLG asked whether it’s written into her contract that she won’t play a “broke” character, Whitfield joked that fans don’t want to see her play a broke character.
“Black women want to see themselves, even the aspirational parts of themselves,” she said. “Those characters resonate with them, the complexity of the glamor.”
She then teased that she doesn’t necessarily want to play a slave to demonstrate the range of Black characters because “we’ve seen enough of those.”
In the upcoming erotic thriller, Whitfield stars alongside Chloe Bailey, Lucien Laviscount, Anna Diop, Romy Woods, and Coco Jones as a matriarch of great status and wealth, a role that will feel familiar to many fans of her work.
The actress, who hails from Baton Rouge, comes by it honestly. Born in the 1950s to a dentist and composer father and a finance agency executive mother, she grew up in a prominent Black family. Her mother eventually served as president of the Louisiana Finance Agency, while her father helped found a local theater, where she first caught the acting bug.
That passion took her to Howard University, where she earned a degree in theater before becoming involved in Washington, D.C.’s theater scene. By the late 1980s, she had made her way onto television screens across America, and after winning an Emmy Award for her portrayal of Baker in 1991, she cemented her status in the cultural zeitgeist as the queen of playing complex, glamorous Black women.
In HBO’s “The Josephine Baker Story,” Whitfield brought to life one of history’s most fascinating and glamorous Black women, a figure brimming with talent and ambition. In 1997’s “Eve’s Bayou,” she portrayed a prominent and protective mother. Then, in the 1998 miniseries “The Wedding,” based on Dorothy West’s classic novel of the same name, she stepped into the role of the notorious and elitist Corinne Coles, the mother figure at the center of the Martha’s Vineyard-set drama. More recently, in “The Chi,” she stole the show as the sophisticated old-money matriarch Alicia.
Beyond their station in life, all of these women possess qualities that are very real: beauty, ambition, joy, grit, determination, power, education, hard-won status, cunning, and class. They embody many of the things, as Whitfield noted, that Black women aspire to have themselves.
Through these characters, Black women also get to see the difficult parts of themselves that they’re often taught or encouraged to suppress. Perhaps that’s the real appeal of a Whitfield character. It’s not that she lives in a mansion or arrives on screen draped in designer labels. It’s that she takes up space.
Her characters are often the smartest person in the room, or at least the person most convinced they are. They don’t apologize for wanting power, respect, love, attention, legacy, or control. They scheme. They seduce. They get jealous. They rage. And boy, do some of them crash out. In a culture that often rewards Black women for shrinking themselves, Whitfield has built a career out of portraying women who refuse to. The glamour may get audiences to turn to the right channel, but it’s the audacity that keeps them watching.
While reflecting on her regal repertoire during the panel, Whitfield added, “We are not a monolith, and there are so many facets of us, we are such a beautiful people.”